#sue the shoebill

[elizabeths-dumbassery]

Gave up on the sketching after doing the full body ones but meet one of those ocs I mentioned last week!

This is Subira (Sue) the Shoebill. She and her little pal there [ill do her later I'm tired] help the restoration gather resources and refugees from towns messed up from battles with Eggman. She's the leader of this team and would probably have gone to the bunker and helped gather intel about Starline and stuff but those plans got foiled by Kit absolutely burying a buncha shit

Translation to the sign language in the alt text. Tell me if I got any signs wrong I'm still learning asl and would like tips if yall got any

[cookie-waffle]

I get way too over emotional about dinosaurs. Like, I know it’s not a fandom-related special interest and is about science and evolution, so, there’s not exactly any angsty plots to cry over, but it genuinely makes me sad that we’ve chosen to portray dinos as monsters in popular media, simply because the skeletons looke “scary”. And, I do get why, since, back before they were discovered to be extinct animals, people assumed they were finding dragon and other monster bones.

But it frustrates me to see SO MANY people outright refuse to accept the fact that they were just normal animals that likely had no real malicious intent. They think of dinos with feathers and picture something over the top and silly, rather than the amazing colors, soul-piercing eyes, and intelligence that so many modern birds have. When they think of specimens such as Sue the rexy, they think of a big scary monster, rather than a beautiful animal that may have been emotionally intelligent.

These were real, living, breathing animals. They had beautiful feathers of every kind. A lot of them were a lot fatter and “softer” looking than most media portrays them as. Rexies are thought to have been attentive parents, meaning they absolutely would have had the emotional capacity for love, empathy, and sadness to some extent. They’re really no different from the rest of us. They only look like “monsters” because the evolution of big animals was basically reset when the meteor killed them, thus making them seem like literal aliens to the descendants of the survivors. But were are, in the end, just another part of our family tree. These were our distant ancient cousins, not monsters, not horror movie villains.

Some things to consider before I stop rambling about the weird giant birds:

- Opossums are such an old linage that the first ones likely saw non-avian dinosaurs with their own eyes

- There are in fact, still some dinosaurs left that straight up look like they don’t belong in this time period (bearded vultures, cassowaries, hoatzins, shoebills, and more)

-Dinosaurs are not even the dominant animals on this planet anymore, and yet they are still extremely diverse. Birds come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and have all sorts of different social behaviors. Imagine how much more weird, interesting, and diverse they must have been while they were still dominant.

- While still developing in the egg, birds will at some point have razor sharp teeth, long tails, and claws. These traits can even be turned on by scientists so that the bird will hatch, no joke, looking like a straight up prehistoric raptor. This isn’t theoretical, they are literally able to do it. But, no eggs have been hatched due to the questionable ethical implications of what is essentially reversing the evolution of an animal.

- It’s much more likely that intelligent aliens will look more similar to a therapod dino than a human, since our body plan is extremely rare in nature.

- Baby rexes didn’t just look like mini versions of their parents. It’s thought that they were small and fluffy. Ya know, like a baby chicken

- Speaking of chickens, strapping a plunger to one’s butt will make it walk like a T-rex. Because science.